Welcome back, everyone.  Let’s jump in.

You will recall that last fall the Legault government, reeling from a by-election loss to a suddenly resurgent Parti Québécois, decided to parade its nationalist bona fides by giving an unprovoked kicking to some major anglophone institutions: to wit, McGill, Concordia and Bishop’s.  This kicking – which was imposed on all universities but clearly had a disproportionate impact on the three anglo schools – consisted of two separate policies.

1. Imposing a minimum $17,000/year tuition fee on Canadian undergraduate and professional masters’ students from other provinces (it was previously $9K).  All this extra money would go directly to Quebec City; the institutions would keep none of it.  80-90% of out-of-province students in Quebec attend the three anglo universities.  The fee was widely expected to cause a drop in student numbers from out-of-province because it would make the institutions uncompetitive.  The loss of students was seen as a major financial threat to Bishop’s (which relies heavily on out-of-province students) and a major cultural threat to McGill (whose status as a national institution to a large degree rests on its ability to get smart kids from across the country into a weird little Montreal bubble for four years).
2. Imposing a clawback of about $17,000 per international student, but offering universities a partial refund by putting international student numbers back into the calculations for weighted student unit funding.  The net change per student depends a bit on the fields in which students choose to study but at McGill at least they calculate the loss as being about $5K per student.

The two measures hit the three universities differently.  At Bishop’s, it was the out-of-province measure which hit hardest, while at Concordia and McGill the international student measures were much more punishing.

(I should note here: back on November 15, I provided a set of calculations about the likely short- and long-term effects of the Quebec funding changes and noted that my numbers for McGill were more optimistic than the ones the university itself had published.  The folks at McGill were kind enough to subsequently provide me a view into their thinking re: cost estimates.  Our differences turned out to be the result of three things.  First, while we had a common understanding of the immediate effects on the university, but slightly different ways of explaining/expressing it, particularly when it came to different time horizons.  Second, we differed in our assumptions re: how the Government of Quebec would redistribute clawed-back income: they were more pessimistic than I was and probably not without reason.  Third, I assumed that the institution would be able to react dynamically over a medium-term horizon and enrol more international students while McGill did not, citing previous challenges in raising international student numbers.  Different assumptions will get you different results, and McGill certainly has lots of reasons to take a more conservative view than I do).

So far I haven’t told you anything I didn’t say back in October in a pair of blogs on the subject (here and here).  But on December 13, the Quebec Government changed its mind about the policy.  The province agreed to reduce the minimum tuition charge for Canadian out-of-province students to a mere $12,000, and it provided Bishop’s with what amounts to a total waiver on the policy as long as it keeps its out-of-province student numbers stable.  So far, so good!  Then McGill announced it was going to provide automatic $3,000 scholarships to out-of-province undergraduates in most disciplines (the exception being those like Engineering where a $12,000 fee is not out of line with what Ontario schools are charging anyway).  Originally, there was no mention of how this would be paid for, but alumni response was immense and it now seems as though much of the program – which will cost about $16 million per year fully phased-in – will be funded by donations (Concordia responded a week later with its own somewhat less-expensive and more marks-oriented scholarship program).

From a fundraising perspective, this whole scholarship thing seems really odd.  Whatever money is raised is not going to McGill, it’s going to Quebec City.  The CAQ took out-of-province students hostage, and McGill alumni quickly queued up to pay the ransom.  There’s a tiny possibility this might encourage future bad behaviour from the provincial government.  It’s got to be killing the Advancement folks that all this money that could be going to fund actual improvements at the university is going to pay off politicians who actively hate it.  But whatever else you say about this initiative, what it shows is that McGill is quite willing to sacrifice a lot – or at least forego a lot of potential cash – in order to preserve its cultural identity as Canada’s elite melting pot.  Not every institution would spend that kind of money on what amounts to cultural identity, and it’s worth some kudos.

But.  There’s more!  Turns out that the reduction to $12,000 is conditional.  Out of the blue, the CAQ came up with a freaking condition.  And that condition?  That 80% of matriculating undergraduates from outside Quebec sit and pass an intermediate French language examination.   If the university can’t meet that test, the $17,000 fee gets re-instated.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  Learning languages is a Good Thing and on the whole Canadian universities don’t do enough to encourage language acquisition.  And if this rule were restricted to Canadian students – nearly all of whom will have at least some French to begin with – it’s conceivable that McGill and Concordia could meet this test with minimal consequences.  Unfortunately, out-of-province Canadians are less than half of the population to which this measure applies, because the government also wants it to apply to international students.  For them, assuming they don’t already have French as a first or second language – which is likely the case for most students from China and India, which together make up the majority of international students at McGill – getting to the intermediate level is basically tantamount to adding another semester to their studies.  It will put McGill at an enormous disadvantage with respect to recruiting these students.  The implications run to tens of millions of dollars.

In other words, the CAQ is making it easier for anglo universities to attract domestic students (on which they lose money) by making it harder for them to attract international students (on which they make money).  This is not the act of a government seeing the light.  It is an act of sadism.

Meanwhile, in December 6^th, McGill President Deep Saini held a press conference on 6 December and said among other things that McGill was considering setting up campuses in other provinces.  I like this idea very much in the sense that McGill finally seems to recognize that its policy of ’shutting up and eating whatever crap gets shovelled its way from Quebec City’ – which literally constituted the entirety of McGill’s provincial GR strategy under Suzanne Fortier – is no longer working and needs to be replaced.  But at the same time, I think it’s a bit off track.  I am not sure any other Canadian province offers McGill very much as a location.  First of all, few provinces will be eager to welcome the extra international students a McGill satellite campus would bring, and second, I doubt there are many research universities in Canada that would welcome extra competition in their home markets.  From a market, and regulatory perspective, you could just about imagine sticking a campus in downtown Calgary (still hurting for tenants), or maybe in Ottawa, but it’s hard to see McGill’s U-15 partners going along with it.

Instead, McGill should think bigger.  Forget Canada; think global.

Some obvious plays:

•           Set up a medical school in Barbados.   It would be a great source of revenue, and lots of Canadian medical students who currently have to go to Ireland or Poland could go here instead.
•           Set up a campus in Europe, preferably somewhere convenient to future Horizon Europe research partners in the Sciences.  France would actually be an ideal spot if you wanted to poke the CAQ in the eye, not least because it’s fairly relaxed about private institutions teaching in English (and boy there is a lot of room to build near Paris-Saclay).
•           Now that new legislation allows repatriation of funds from overseas campuses set up in India, this country – one of the few with a still-growing youth population – seems like an obvious place for an overseas campus.  Stay out of Delhi and Bombay: think Bangalore, Hyderabad or Chennai.
•           Setting up in China is an obvious no go these days: but the next best thing would be to set up in Korea.  Not get at Korean students, obviously, because demographic collapse is real, but setting up in the Incheon Global Campus gives you a platform to bring in lots of Chinese students who don’t want to travel all the way to Montreal.

Are there risks to this strategy?  Sure.  But as the last few weeks have shown, there doesn’t seem to be much to be gained by playing it safe with a government whose policy vision is driven entirely by by-election and polling results.  McGill’s one huge asset is that it is one of only three universities in the country with a genuinely global brand – it should take advantage of it.

Go big, McGill.  Go global.